Abstract

Friday, July 6, 2018

Ups and downs

I never
met Ralph Hergert, but I did attend his funeral. In his two professions, as a
minister and a social worker, he was widely known in Somerville and Cambridge.
His wife, Leslie F. Hergert, has written a quirky and insightful memoir of her
late husband. The quirkiness is in the book’s structure. Rather than employing
a conventional narrative, Hergert chose the primer mode, titled Alzheimer’s Through the Alphabet: One
Journey of Ups and Downs. I would advise readers to read Hergert’s introduction,
as it provides some important context. Significantly, Hergert states, “This
narrative provides little, if any, advice.” In other words, readers are largely
left to their own interpretations.

Some of the juxtapositions are inspired. On the left page,
for the letter A, the topic is “Annoying Period.” As Hergert put it, “most of
us don’t admit when talking about Alzheimer’s: Our loved ones with Alzheimer’s
do lots of annoying things,” like repeating questions and, in more extreme
situations, putting the keys in the freezer. On the opposite page, the title is
“Becoming a Better Person.” This full passage is difficult to summarize, in
part because Hergert is such an accomplished prose stylist. Here’s an extended
example, under the header, “Mixed Messages.”

“As should be clear by now,” Hergert wrote, “the messages
I have to convey are very mixed. I am never quite sure whether to say how
terrible this disease is or how manageable it is. Is it a devastating disease that
takes a painful toll on loved ones? Is it something you can deal with if you
change your expectations and ways of doing things? ... Do I want legislators
and businesspeople and the public to understand the difficulties of this
expensive, long-lasting disease and its changing support needs? Or do I want to
provide encouragement to people with the disease and their caregivers? Is it
manipulative to change messages with audiences? I worry about that, but both
messages are true and need to be heard.”

One of my favorite entries in this book is “Hope.” This is
not the hope of traditional Christianity. To me, it sounds like the “faith” of
the twentieth-century, embodied in existentialism. Hergert writes: “I live
without hope.” Rejecting the notion of hope (along with two strange metaphors
from Emily Dickinson, “Hope is a strange invention,” and more strangely, “Hope
is the thing with feathers”), Hergert then moves to one of her key points: “I
have found that living without hope frees me to live in the present and experience
the moments—whether sad or happy or funny or difficult—as they come.”

The letter G hosted two near-antonyms: gratitude and
grief. I chose to focus on grief. Hergert went into the etymology of the word, distinguishing
grief from other synonyms. She commented, “Early on, I felt sad from time to
time but was less aware of the ongoing grief. Now it seems to have moved in as
a constant presence, a feeling behind my eyes, a weight that tires me, a cloud
or shadow over the brightest of days.” May I suggest that this is a kind of
dark poetry?

Under the header “Incontinence,” Hergert writes, “Somehow,
body fluids never bothered me.” She makes an exception for snot, which did
gross her out when her daughter was little. But, “when people in our support group
started sharing stories of their husbands pooping on the floor or peeing into
an open suitcase, I said that would be the signal that Ralph needed to go to a
nursing home. But I had forgotten that excrement didn’t bother me except as a
problem and an inconvenience.”

Under J (for “Joy”) is a charming vignette. At that time,
Ralph and Leslie were living in Chicago. It was winter. “The alley was a
minefield of dog poop. I thought it was disgusting and was just about to
complain about it when Ralph said, ‘You know what’s great about winter? All the
dog poop is frozen.’”

And under “Losses” is what Hergert termed “the Ossie Davis
moment.” (Davis was an African-American actor and civil rights pioneer.) The
gist of the matter was that Ralph and Leslie heard on the news one morning that
Davis was dead, and discussed him and his death for several minutes. “Then
Ralph went downstairs to get the newspaper. When he returned, he said, ‘Hey! Ossie
Davis died.’”

The first time I read this passage, I focused on the
humor. It wasn’t until a day or two later that I grasped the pathos of the
situation: Even in 2005, roughly a decade before Ralph’s death, his short-term
memory was severely impaired.

It was many years later when Ralph got lost, in
June 2013. As Leslie put it, “Ralph was a walker. He loved to walk around the
city. It was something he could do as his disease progressed, and it was
something friends could do with him.” Walking was very important to him. He was
not a “wanderer,” a person who goes AWOL from an institution; he left the house
unannounced while Leslie was in the apartment downstairs helping her mother. Massachusetts
has a “Silver Alert” law, which allows police to look for a lost person with
dementia immediately, instead of waiting 48 hours before searching for a
missing adult. There was a beer festival in Davis Square that night, and Leslie
thought it seemed plausible that Ralph was having a beer at the festival. But
Ralph was not there. The next day was even more intense. Things ended safely,
after 28 hours of searching. And Massachusetts’ Silver Alert system had shown
its worth.